A number of industrial applications including, but not limited to, medical devices, communication devices, long range magnetic imaging and navigation systems, as well as scientific areas such as physics and chemistry can benefit from magnetic detection and imaging with a device that has extraordinary sensitivity, ability to capture signals that fluctuate very rapidly (bandwidth) all with a substantive package that is extraordinarily small in size, efficient in power and infinitesimal in volume.
Atomic-sized nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond lattices have been shown to have excellent sensitivity for magnetic field measurement and enable fabrication of small magnetic sensors that can readily replace existing-technology (e.g., Hall-effect) systems and devices. Diamond NV (DNV) sensors can be maintained in room temperature and atmospheric pressure and can even be used in liquid environments (e.g., for biological imaging). DNV-based magnetometry relies on measuring small changes on large signal background. The background signal is large because over half of the content is coming from NV states that do not contribute to the signal. The NV background overlaps with the desired NV− signal making it difficult to optically separate the background from the desired signals.